Do you often find it so hard to convince your agents to follow simple house rules like: not going on over breaks, not wearing flip flops on the production floor, not chatting with their seatmates while they are on a call? Do you always have to remind them about these house rules during your pre or post shift huddles? And then you end up writing them up for violating these rules?

If your answer is yes, my guess is that you failed to get your agents’ buy-in when it comes to following house rules. So how do we make them follow these rules?

For you to effectively convince your people to follow certain house rules, you don’t stop at just telling them to follow it just because it’s a company or an account policy. The key to convincing people to do something is to explain why they have to do it.

An example of a simple house rule is to not go on over break. You need to be able to explain to your agents why this rule is important. You can either give an analogy or a situation wherein they have to wait in line for a long time. So what’s the connection?

In a call center industry, there’s this one metric we call Service Level. Service Level is defined as having the right amount of people to answer a certain amount of calls on a specific period of time. So what happens if we do not have the right amount of people at a certain period of time because one or two agents went on over break? Customers would have to wait on the line for God knows how long. And when they wait for more than 5 minutes, don’t be surprised to get an irate customer. That’s the connection.

How to get your agents buy-in? Simple, make them think like a customer, and you would never have any problems making them want to follow house rules.